Forest Monsen is your host on a journey into technobabble and other emphatic nonsense.

I usually use :set expandtab in Vim, but a particular file I was editing required explicit tab characters. So I set :noexpandtab, but then realized I couldn’t tell which were tabs, and which were spaces. Easy fix:

Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King’s College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.
He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points — the equivalent to missing a whole night’s sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. [Dr. Wilson did not originally make the comparison to marijuana. – eds.]
“This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,” Wilson said. “We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker’s performance by reducing their mental sharpness.
“Companies should encourage a more balanced and appropriate way of working.”
Wilson said the IQ drop was even more significant in the men who took part in the tests.

"Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material."

I archived a directory. It took two hours, then exited with a non-zero exit status (that means an error). Hmm — I was just testing something; I only cared if certain specific subdirectories were present in the archive. So I needed a way to look deep inside, quickly, and find those particular directories.

GNU tar will let you “test” an archive with -t, but I only wanted a list of the directories archived. Then I wanted that sorted. So…

The -tjvf arguments to tar let you look inside, the “tr” command collapses adjacent spaces so that the first “cut” command will output only the sixth (file) field, and the second “cut” command will reduce a directory like “folder/folder/folder/fun.txt” to “folder/folder.” Then “uniq” will remove non-unique names.

Okay, so you very likely have the ‘split’ utility installed (it’s in the GNU coreutils package, so… very likely). If you want to burn a file to multiple media, but you don’t have kdar installed on your desktop… don’t worry about it. Just open a terminal and do:$ split --bytes=600MB --numeric-suffixes filename.zip filename_part_
In my case, I have a 2.8GB file, but I only have 700MB CDs on hand for my burner. So this command will ensure that I get several 600 “megabyte” (1000 bytes * 1000) pieces, named “filename_part_00,” “filename_part_01,” and “filename_part_02,” et cetera.